September 27, 2016

I don't know much about how the pollster organisation YouGov works but I always assumed they valued their reputation for producing meaningful polling data. In this instance I smelled a rat when the Zionist, Community Security Trust retweeted the following YouGov tweet:

Today's survey: do you believe that antisemitism is so deeply entrenched in our culture it is often ignored? https://t.co/LQX8ykFyXC

Now I shouldn't have voted because the question doesn't even make sense but having voted I couldn't access the survey via the twitter link. I had to use this one but here's a screen grab:

I don't know how people accessed the survey in the first place but it seems a lot of people will have come to it via a retweet, same as I did. Look at the question.

"Antisemitism is at the heart of racism". What does that mean? Surely anyone responding to the survey would have to say "Don't know" since that is the only honest answer you can give to a question that doesn't make sense.

"Yet, because it is so deeply entrenched in our thought and culture, it is often ignored and dismissed". There you go, that's the last bit of the statement. And that is a YouGov survey on antisemitism. So whose culture is "ours"? And what do they even mean by thought? The written up thoughts of public intellectuals? School work? Academic books and treatises? Or just the everyday thoughts of everyday people?

Now I know YouGov do fun surveys like asking people whether they agree or not with the statement, "Justin Bieber is wonderful" but clearly this survey isn't just for fun. It appears to be designed by an interested party, like maybe a player in the self-appointed anti-antisemitism industry but if that was the case surely an august institution like YouGov would offer a health warning, wouldn't they?